Dec 31, 2014

"Britain will today be hit by the first wave of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants keen to take advantage of our generous taxpayer-funded benefits. At least 5,000 are expected in the first week alone. The Daily Express has found evidence of an exodus from hundreds of impoverished communities across Romania."

An "exodus" no less. Elsewhere the Express reported a "stampede of eastern Europeans" pouring through open "floodgates" while columnist Leo McKinstry had previously declared "the numbers will undoubtedly be huge", adding "the influx from Bulgaria and Romania is likely to dwarf anything seen before".

They weren't the only ones indulging in such hyperbole:

But 12 months on we now know all this hyperbole was nonsense. Official figures now show the lifting of restrictions lead to an increase in the number of Romanians and Bulgarians entering the UK of just 2,000 people compared to the same measurable period the year before restrictions were lifted (47,000 versus 45,000).

What's more, those figures do not take into account the number of people leaving the UK. Figures released earlier in the year suggested there was a net change of around 4,000 fewer Romanian and Bulgarian workers in the UK following the lifting of restrictions.

Earlier this week the Daily Mail ran a story claiming four out of five new nurses are "FOREIGN".

But it turns out the claim was bogus. The real figure is more like one in five, according to a correction issued by the Health and Social Care Information Service (HSCIS).

The Mail's story relied upon a very misleading calculation whereby the net change in the number of nurses was divided by the number of overseas nurses hired. It failed to take into account the all important number of British nurses hired.

If they had done that they would have been left with a figure of around one in five foreign nurses and a front page that looked like this:

HSCIC has written to Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre to complain, stating:

"We are writing to express our extreme concern that the Daily Mail has chosen to use inaccurate figures on its front page for two days, despite clear Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) guidance that these figures are incorrect.Furthermore, you have resisted consistent approaches by telephone and email from the HSCIC media team, which explained the inaccuracies and requested a correction. The public have a right to know that the claim above is statistically unsound."

Business Insider has published an interesting review of how newspapers are fairing as they transition from the paper-based world they knew so well into a digital age which so clearly still flummoxes some of them.

The Guardian and the Mail lead the way with big numbers their reward for giving content away free, though questions will always persist about the sustainability and margins of a free model.

However, Business Insider is more concerned about the rest of the press pack. Of the Telegraph, it says "the entire organization is struggling with the transition to digital".

The Telegraph's metered paywall, which lets us have a few stories free per month before kicking in is a clumsy, neither-nor sort of measure, the logic of which I have struggled to understand since it was introduced.

The problem with it is that, by chance, I only seem to hit the paywall while in the process of clicking on something I can find for free elsewhere - a sports report, a piece of news from the wires or a piece of news written up from a press release. Any inclination to sign up is quashed by the fact I'll be able to get what I'm looking for elsewhere, for free.

If the Telegraph really wants to have a paywall which is triggered at a given point, it would surely be better served linking that trigger to types of content rather than just picking an arbitrary monthly limit. Give the commodity stuff away free, tag it to not trigger the paywall, but make people sign-up for the unique stuff. For example, I enjoy the political sketches of Michael Deacon but as he doesn't produce enough each month to trigger the paywall across the multiple devices I use to access the Telegraph website, I get to read it all for free. But Sod's Law says the paywall would activate as I clicked on, for example, the Telegraph's write-up of a Rightmove survey about the best places to live in Britain (St Ives, apparently). In that case I'd easily be able to find the article elsewhere:

The Times and The Sun meanwhile are toiling away behind their far less ambiguous paywalls. Business Insider is critical of the dramatic fall in online readers that the paywall brought about at both titles, but that drop will not have come as a surprise to News UK and the company remains very upbeat about the progress it is making. As reported last month, there are now 225,000 subscribers signed up to The Sun's digital offering, with the majority paying £7.99 per month. Though as an aside The Sun did this week launch a site covering the Millies - its annual awards for military service men and women - with articles which sit outside the paywall. However, News UK says this was a one off for the Millies and it has no immediate plans to put other content outside the paywall.

The bleakest prognosis is reserved for the Express which Business Insider reports is "losing the war on all fronts" with print sales in a similar decline to many of its rivals but web traffic that is considerably lower. In October this year, the Mail Online got almost as many people onto its website in a single day (14.4 million) as the Express managed in the whole month (16.4 million). The According to ABCe figures, the Express gets less than 10 per cent of the monthly traffic enjoyed by its nearest editorial neighbour.

The Express's response seems to have been an attempt to ape the Daily Mail's infamous 'sidebar of shame' with much of its online content but its efforts are clearly failing to pull in the same volume of readers.

The Express's tweets channel the Mail's 'sidebar of shame' but are clearly not driving readers online in anywhere near the same numbers as its rival.

Dec 15, 2014

The Mail on Sunday was displaying trademark outrage this weekend over BBC Radio 4's decision to pick Hilary Mantel's series of short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, for Book At Bedtime. The paper described it as a "sick and perverted fantasy".

Which is odd, because when the Mail is trying to sell the book in its online store it describes it as a "brilliant collection of short stories".

Dec 14, 2014

On Wednesday Channel 4 News ran a hatchet job on a so-called 'hipster' cafe in London's Shoreditch which is selling imported breakfast cereals at upwards of £2.50 per bowl. Now the business owner has taken to Facebook to hit back at what he claims was a "completely unfair" attack.

The ''Cereal Killer' cafe has been pretty relentlessly mocked since its plans to sell bowls of breakfast cereal were first announced and clearly the Channel 4 News team were among those who thought it ridiculous. However, given they couldn't just run a report calling it absurd, they instead chose to challenge the cafe's owner on the issue of poverty in East London.

Channel 4 News reported:

"The business sells breakfast cereal from £2.50 a bowl, while one in every two children growing up in Tower Hamlets are living in poverty."

However you look at that statement those two things are unrelated, despite Channel 4's attempt to suggest there is a connection. Undoubtedly there is an awful divide between London's richest and poorest but laying the blame at the door of some hipsters who've been selling Cheerios for a week is more than a stretch.

In the video report the cafe owner, Gary Keery, shut down the interview on camera after becoming flustered by the line of questioning about poverty.

Gary Keery, left, the owner of the Cereal Killer cafe tells Channel 4's reporter: "Can we stop this interview, I don't like the questions you're asking."

He was clearly ill-prepared for the interview, hadn't thought it through and handled it very poorly. But he can be forgiven for not expecting to be singled out for such a line of attack, when a pub around the corner is charging upwards of £6 for a pint for beer and a restaurant up the road has a £19 starter and a £32 main course on its menu, as well as bottles of wine for more than £1,000 on its wine list.

In fact, if the Channel 4 News team are going to start picking fights with any business charging over the odds for goods and services in and around East London they'd never report on anything else.

Keery certainly felt his business had been singled out unfairly. In an open letter to Channel 4 News, published on Facebook, he wrote:

"You obviously don't understand business if you think I don't have to put a mark-up on what I sell. It may be the poorest borough in London but let's not forget Canary Wharf is also in this borough but I am the one to blame eh? I still have to pay over the top rent for my premises and pay the 12 staff I have employed so I either have to make profit or I will be out of business. Maybe if I charged over £3 for a coffee and dodged taxes like some cafés - the reporters would leave me alone."

Keery also took the opportunity to point out that the reporter who visited his business didn't even pay for the cereal he ate while there.

"You didn't even pay me for the cereal which you could so easily afford... so I will send you a bill for the extortionate £3.20."

Touché.

On the bright side, Keery should probably console himself with all the free publicity his cafe has been getting.

Dec 10, 2014

Of all the common tabloid journalese we are exposed to one of the oddest phrases, when you stop to think about it, is the one suggesting celebrities regularly embrace, kiss or go on dates with "strangers". Here's an example that caught my eye today (right).

Did Melanie Sykes really spot a stranger in the crowd and just embrace him? Was this man just minding his own business when Sykes set about him, entirely at random? And what was it about the man that made him so mysterious? How was he behaving? What dark secrets might his behaviour have been concealing?

Or is it just that the journalist had no idea who the man is and couldn't be bothered to find out?

After all, it seems possible that Sykes did know who the man is. It would certainly explain her familiarity with him. In fact I'd go so far as to confidently predict the man's identity was not a mystery to Sykes.

Dec 09, 2014

It's not every day you see the Daily Mail run a story which makes a cast iron case for increased immigration. But Tuesday's front page (right) is pretty unambiguous, even if the language is still typically 'us and them' and their motivation is to stop builders from overseas earning high salaries in the UK.

The Mail is incredulous that a scarcity of bricklayers in the UK means skilled immigrants are able to charge a reported £1,000 per week. The Mail's story makes a strong case for attracting more builders to the UK to plug the skills gap, reduce scarcity and bring down the cost of construction.

Perhaps the editor is having an extension built.

Or perhaps the paper is thinking of everybody else who would benefit from lowering the cost of building new houses and stabilising the house market. However, given that could ultimately be bad news for the kind of wealthy home-owners who normally argue in favour of lowering immigration, I'm sticking with the extension theory for now.

Dec 05, 2014

The Sun continued its increasingly bitter spat with Russell Brand on Friday with a front page declaring that 64 per cent of Brits don’t find the comedian funny and 68 per cent think he is a hypocrite. The findings appear accompanied by the headline "THE NATION SPEAKS", though the survey, conducted by YouGov, polled just 574 people.

Earlier this week The Sun called Brand a hypocrite in another front page attack:

Dec 04, 2014

Manger danger? Has the nativity been killed off by killjoys and political correctness?

Like a family bringing some tired Christmas decorations down from the loft, the media have this week dusted down a festive favourite with claims that the traditional school nativity play is under threat from political correctness gone mad.

The Times reports: "Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus are being edged out of schools’ Christmas productions, with only a third performing the traditional nativity play this year."

The stats come from a poll by parenting website Netmums, backed up with some anecdotal evidence that may or may not confuse real life with the nativity scene in Love Actually which featured a family of lobsters.

The Daily Mail is certainly troubled. "The most popular Christmas play now staged in schools is an 'updated nativity' featuring characters such as aliens, punk fairies [and] drunk spacemen," claims the paper.

Obviously arguing over which made-up characters should or shouldn’t appear in a school play could seem an exercise in futility yet some papers return to this story every year. For over a decade the Mail has been telling us "schools have stopped putting on nativity plays", adding that it was done "out of a misplaced consideration for parents of different religions" and quoting angry grandparents calling it "political correctness gone crazy".

And that really seems to be the issue. The papers aren't expressing concern about a shortage of nativity plays. They probably realise most traditions from bygone times eventually have to change or disappear. They are really expressing concern about the country becoming a bit too "diverse" and if they can blame this for the diminished interest in nativity plays then they no doubt feel they can stir up a little anger among their readers.

The Mail of course is no stranger to this kind of "they come over here, ruining our Christmas" nonsense. For many years the paper tried to convince us UK councils were banning the word "Christmas", replacing it with "Winterval" - a story the Mail has since had to admit was not true.

In September 2011 the Mail finally acknowledged that 'Winterval' has not replaced 'Christmas'.